CCDH: ‘X failing to address flood of misinformation regarding US election’

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) argues that X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking program called Community Notes falls short to counter false and misleading claims about the upcoming US presidential election.

In 2023, Elon Musk launched Community Notes, a feature that allows users to comment on posts in order to flag false or misleading content on X. The goal was to stop the dissemination of illegal content in the EU and to combat information manipulation.

The CCDH has analyzed the Community Notes feature and found that 209 out of a sample of the 283 misleading posts regarding the upcoming presidential election - or 74% - were misleading. The Community Notes on these messages never got shown to users. The original messages on the other hand amassed over 2.2 billion views.

“This allows misleading posts about voter fraud, election integrity, and political candidates to spread and be viewed millions of times. Posts without Community Notes promoting false narratives about US politics have garnered billions of views, outpacing the reach of their fact-checked counterparts by 13 times,” the nonprofit group says in a statement.

CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed claims that Elon Musk’s Community Notes are intended to be a ‘democratic and transparent process’. However, in practice it doesn’t work this way. For Community Notes to be shown, there must be consensus. On polarizing social issues that rarely happens. And that’s why Community Notes fail precisely where they are needed the most.

“In reality, it is messy, complicated, and opaque rules and systems make it impossible for all voices to be heard. Without checks and balances, proper oversight, and well-resourced trust and safety teams in place, X cannot rely on Community Notes to keep X safe,” Ahmed says.

In a statement to Associated Press (AP) he calls Community Notes a “little more than a band aid on a torrent of hate and disinformation that undermines our democracy and further polarizes our communities”.

Keith Coleman, Vice President of Product at X who oversees Community Notes, claims that the program “maintains a high bar to make notes effective and maintain trust across perspectives, and thousands of election and politics related notes have cleared that bar in 2024”.

“In the last month alone, hundreds of such notes have been shown on thousands of posts and have been seen tens of millions of times. It is because of their quality that notes are so effective,” he told AP.